If you do not have a child under the age of 16, or are not yourself under the age of 16, you might have no idea who Raina is. So it was with me. I called a friend with kids and said, "Have you heard of an author named Raina Telgemeier?" "Of course," she said, sounding bemused, as if I'd asked whether she was familiar with the automobile. "Like the Beatles for children," another parent friend explained.
Last spring, standing in the theater at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum in Columbus, Ohio, surveying the hundreds of kids and teenagers who had come to meet Raina, I realized the scale of my ignorance. Half an hour earlier, her fans had been standing on their seats, jumping up and down, waving their arms in the air, but now the long wait for autographs had begun. Everyone had been assigned a number and organized into subgroups so they could approach the signing table in shifts. Nobody seemed to mind especially—many were plunked down on the floor, contentedly rereading her books, as an hour passed, then an hour and a half.
One mother and her 8-year-old daughter had come from Philadelphia. Another family had driven up from Tennessee. “We would go anywhere to see Raina,” one parent said.
“The magic of Raina is real,” confirmed a school librarian who’d brought her daughter to meet Telgemeier here, at a public event celebrating the author’s first retrospective. Every spring, the librarian told me, she runs a report to determine which of the library’s books have been checked out the most. It was June, so she could share that, once again, “four out of the top five are Raina books. Children reread those books over and over and over.”
この記事は The Atlantic の March 2024 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、8,500 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です ? サインイン
この記事は The Atlantic の March 2024 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、8,500 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です? サインイン
After the Miracle
Cystic fibrosis once guaranteed an early deathbut a medical breakthrough has given many patients a chance to live decades longer than expected. What do they do now?
WILLIAM WHITWORTH 1937-2024
WILLIAM WHITWORTH, the editor of The Atlantic from 1980 to 1999, had a soft voice and an Arkansas accent that decades of living in New York and New England never much eroded.
Christine Blasey Ford Testifies Again
Her new memoir doubles as a modern-day horror story.
Is Theo Von the Next Joe Rogan?
Or is he something else entirely?
Orwell's Escape
Why the author repaired to the remote Isle of Jura to write his masterpiece, 1984
What's So Bad About Asking Where Humans Came From?
Human origin stories have often been used for nefarious purposes. That doesn't mean they are worthless.
Miranda's Last Gift
When our daughter died suddenly, she left us with grief, memories and Ringo.
BEFORE FACEBOOK, THERE WAS Black Planet
An alternative history of the social web
CLASH OF THE PATRIARCHS
A hard-line Russian bishop backed by the political might of the Kremlin could split the Orthodox Church in two.
THE MAN WHO DIED FOR THE LIBERAL ARTS
Chugging through Pacific waters in February 1942, the USS Crescent City was ferrying construction equipment and Navy personnel to Pearl Harbor, dispatched there to assist in repairing the severely damaged naval base after the Japanese attack.